All In Love is Fair

By: Danielle Kelly

“There weren't street fairs back in the 1960s. The street fair is something that came after the Renaissance fair. So people didn't make crafts. My parents had a very hard time finding people, professional artists, who were making any quantity of anything. They were hobbyists, but there weren't a lot of working crafts people. So the crafts movement was largely started by the Renaissance fairs, and then it became very popular in a lot of different ways,” (Kevin Patterson).

Acting troupes also had opportunities for employment year round. While both the Renaissance Fair and the Dickens Fair have many volunteers, they have always been based on performance and theater. Through these venues, actors are able to pursue their dreams and also have enough to eat at the end of the day. Not to mention, they spread cheer with them. According to Patterson, “we train all 350 of the performers at the Dickens Christmas fair, and then some, because many of the people that are in the booths and all of the shopkeepers have to be in costume and in character, too. So we teach them the language, we teach them the dance. We teach them some of the superstitions or otherwise just the way that they would have thought in Victorian England, and we have wonderful teachers that put them through these classes. It's about a three week process every year, and some of the groups actually meet all year.”

People love these events so much, that even through the pandemic this tradition was preserved. “We don't feel like COVID really interrupted the fair that much, We had one year when we had Dickens fair at home, where we did all of the videos and we did all of the recipes that were able to help people to bring the joys of the Dickens Christmas fair into their own parlors. So, for instance, we had Father Christmas sitting by a fireside, reading the night before Christmas, and people could play that in their homes. So in a sense, we made the pandemic situation where we all had to be separate, maybe a little more special, because we did some things we couldn't do otherwise at the live event.” Even in a time of hopelessness and fear, actors and people from youtube got together to spread joy.